I think I hate San Francisco.

The cleaning plan for the SF stations includes daily wet mopping or scrubbing the concourses and platforms. Each of those stations is supposed to have a dedicated cleaning crew. (16th and 24th share a crew.) (See slides 20 and 21.) I believe the plan also includes daily cleaning of the downtown station entryways. (Slide 25.) There's a separate "deep clean" cycle for each of the downtown stations that takes six weeks. (See slides 23 and 24.) I do wonder what the story is with some of the long hallways in the downtown stations, though. And yeah, smells persist, unfortunately.

There is no way that they are cleaning the long hallways leading daily from the entrances to the ticket gates. Those are the areas where the homeless come to sleep. Again, I'm not asking BART (Bay Area Rapid Toilet) to solve the SF homeless problem but I do expect them to clean the stations from where we enter the station, the entire station including walkways.

AND...with a relative with a serious medical issue who couldn't walk up stairs she found the fucking escalators were broken at three of the cities most busy stations. The elevator at Powell is a moving toilet. Its really sickening. The Board members of BART should ride the elevator at Powell for an hour one afternoon.

The public transit stations really shocked me in SF when I used to live in the Bay Area and central coast in regards to the almost permanent smell they have.

The CTA in Chicago is no panacea but it shocked me at how "clean" it was relative to SF. Granted, in the summer a few stations can reek and the Red Line has some stations that have funky sections in regards to smell, but it's not ever the entirety of the station. I feel like our advantage though in Chicago is that many tracks are elevated and exposed to the outdoors so trash and smells don't stick around too long. Also, in a lot of the Loop areas you have tons of Streets & Sanitation workers constantly sweeping all the public areas.

Every time I goto SF I think, "This city has so much potential if they'd just get rid of the damned smell."